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Column Two
News and opinion on all things KM & CM |
James Robertson
Step Two Designs
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Written by James Robertson Step Two Designs |
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Articles by Month: October 2007
Heading to Europe and the USOk, just about to head to the airport for the start of a three week overseas trip. First stop London, then Denmark, New York and back home. If you're in any of those places and want to catch up for a coffee, drop me a line... Posted by jamesr at 01:58 PM
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Sharpening your skills: managing innovationHBS Working Knowledge have published a collection of articles on managing innovation. To quote: Sharpening Your Skills dives into the HBS Working Knowledge archives to bring together articles on ways to improve your business skills. Questions to be answered: Posted by jamesr at 11:27 AM
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The limitations of server log files for usability analysisKarl Groves has written an article on using server log files for usability analysis. To quote: One of the challenges faced most often by those of us in the field of usability is finding good data about user behavior quickly, accurately, and, in most cases, cheaply. In an environment where many stakeholders question the return on investment in usability, some in the industry have developed interesting ideas aimed at gathering user data. One such idea is the analysis of server log files to gather information about user behavior. On the surface, it is easy to understand the gravitation towards server logs: They're supposedly a data source which portrays what people are doing on a site. Server logs supposedly show what people click on, which pages they view, and how they get from page to page. Posted by jamesr at 10:33 AM
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Factors affecting your knowledge environmentShawn Callahan has written a post on factors impact on knowledge management. To quote: One of the aims of a knowledge strategy is to design a set of activities to enhance an organisation's knowledge environment. The knowledge environment includes all the factors, both within and outside an organisation, which might affect the creation, sharing and use of knowledge. The list of factors is potentially limitless but experience has shown that many of the important factors can be clumped together under 7 headings. Posted by jamesr at 01:36 PM
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Awards ceremony in EuropeFor those in the area, an official Intranet Innovation Awards ceremony will be held for the European winners, as part of the cmf2007 conference in Denmark. The awards will be presented at the opening of the conference on November 7, to Fiat Group Automobiles (Platinum winner), Environment Agency (Gold winner) and Nycomed (Gold winner). I'll be giving a presentation on all the winning entries, sharing screenshots and highlights. Even better, each of the three European winners will also be talking at the conference, giving further insights into their award-winning projects. (It's not too late to sign up for the conference.) PS. the first version of this post indicated a date of November 6 for the conference opening, which is actually the tutorial day (I should've known, I'm running a tutorial!). Anyway, this updated post contains the correct date... Posted by jamesr at 12:38 PM
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Content management skillsAnn Rockley has written an article listing required content management skills. To quote: I'm often asked what type of skills someone would need to succeed in the area of content management. The following is a top-level list. It is not necessary to have all these skills, the list indicates some of the skills that would be useful. Posted by jamesr at 07:34 PM
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Identical vs derivative reuseAnn Rockley has written an article on identical vs derivative reuse. To quote: Reuse can bring many content benefits to an organization including increased productivity, reduced costs, greater consistency, more usable content. But is reuse really realistic? Don't you need to modify content for the channel (e.g., web, print) or the audience (e.g., region, product). This is always an interesting topic, and while I agree with the definitions in this article, I would question that even 15% of content can be reused. Also, the idea of "derivative reuse" is optimistic using most commonly available CMS products. Still, this is topic always worth discussing. (I wrote an article on this a while back.) Posted by jamesr at 07:25 PM
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Getting more from the Intranet Innovation Awards
We've had some excellent early feedback on the Intranet Innovation Awards, which is always encouraging. We've also shared a lot more than just the names of the winners. Read this article (published today) to get a one-page summary on each winner (including screenshots), or obtain a copy of the 115-page Intranet Innovations Report. Posted by jamesr at 03:12 PM
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Blog still not upgradedJust a quick note to say that my blog still hasn't been upgraded, so no comments yet. Looks like we've run into some problems with our webhost, but I remain hopeful of getting them resolved soon. In the meantime, the old software keeps chugging along... Posted by jamesr at 12:19 PM
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Winners of inaugural Intranet Innovation Awards announced
The winners of the awards have just been announced, and the full details are shared in the 115-page Intranet Innovations 2007 report. Platinum award winner:
Gold awards winners:
Commended entries:
We received a flood of great entries, from across the globe, from public and private sector organisations, large and small. Looking through the submissions, we could immediately see some great ideas, generating a considerable sense of anticipation for the judging process. Naturally, not everyone can be a winner, but everyone is worthy of commendation for taking the time to review their activities and to identify the best of what they have done. So to all those who submitted entries: thank you. To the winners: congratulations! Posted by jamesr at 12:13 PM
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Catching my blog upAs long-time readers of this blog would know, there hasn't been commenting enabled for quite a while. The back story is that this blog was overwhelmed by comment spam, hundreds per day. With the ancient copy of Movable Type that was installed, there just wasn't any good way of dealing with this. So with great reluctance, I had to turn commenting off. At long last, the time has come. I've now found a bona-fide Movable Type expert, and have engaged them to upgrade Column Two to Movable Type version 4, the current release. The will allow me to turn commenting back on, as well as giving me a much-needed blog search. Wish me luck! This will be happening in the next day or so, and there may be a few glitches. Thanks in advance for your patience during this time of transition... Posted by jamesr at 07:15 PM
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Collaboratively creating CMS scenarios
The context was that the client wanted some more help to construct the scenarios, as well as engaging the whole project group in the process. This would gather the widest input, as well as helping to ensure that everyone ended up on the same page. So I pulled out my coloured pens and sticky notes, and we did several rounds of affinity mapping. This is how it worked:
Reviewing the session, these were the strengths of the approach:
And the limitations:
Anyway, shared for interest, your mileage may vary... Posted by jamesr at 07:01 PM
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Usability tools podcast: are there users who always search?Jared Spool and Christine Perfetti have published a podcast on the question: are there users who always search? To quote: In the design world, there's always been an assumption that some users demonstrate "search-dominant" tendencies by going right to the search engine when they first visit a web site looking for content. But back in 2000, UIE made a groundbreaking claim that blew away the web design world. From our research, we concluded that users aren't search dominant. A few years back, I wrote the article, Are There Users Who Always Search?, and have received tons of questions about the findings ever since. Posted by jamesr at 06:34 PM
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Building a culture of collaborationBill Roberts has written an article on building a culture of collaboration. To quote: Today's collaborative tools fall into two broad groups: tools created for a web-based function, and collaborative platforms designed for various disciplines from supply chain management to HR processes to general knowledge sharing. Posted by jamesr at 06:27 PM
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Followup to collaboration is anti knowledge sharing?A few days ago I posted an article titled: collaboration tools are anti knowledge sharing? This was a deliberately provocative article, and I've now had an excellent response from Michael Sampson. To quote: If the team has done a proper job of collecting and collating all of their discussions, all of the document editions, all of their meeting notes and so forth, that is not a collection of "knowledge" ... it's a set of data points and information items on the route to a final destination. James writes that the inability for merely anyone to understand the context of each item ("What is this file, is it a final or a draft? How does it relate to this other document? Where is the main project plan?") is a failing of the tool. As I've commented on his post, I agree with everything that he's said. This is definitely not a technology problem, although it can be a problem caused by technology in the absence of appropriate governance. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of collaboration, and have given up on the "white elephant" KM solutions a long time ago. What I'm concerned about is that collaboration is very much viewed as a technology issue by IT areas, leading to it spreading in an unmanaged way. This is the lesson we didn't learn from the Notes era, and are just about to be repeated in the SharePoint era if we aren't careful. (I've got more coming on the solutions, not just the problems, so watch this space!) PS. Michael has published some superb resources relating to collaboration, including the 7 Pillars of IT-Enabled Team Productivity. See the bottom of Michael's post for a longer list of resources. Posted by jamesr at 06:15 PM
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Folksonomies and image tagging: seeing the future?Diane Neal has written an article on folksonomies, from a librarian's perspective. To quote: Folksonomies are one of today's hottest Internet trends. They are but one part of Web 2.0, which, in part, refers to the ability of Internet users to add, change and improve World Wide Web content. A folksonomy is created as users of a website add "tags" (keywords) to describe items on a website. The users choose their own keywords; few or no restrictions are imposed on their choices. The terms are not chosen from a previously existing controlled vocabulary, a strict taxonomy or any other officially sanctioned method of bibliographic description. [Thanks to InfoDesign.] Posted by jamesr at 09:38 AM
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The information architect as change agentMatthew C. Clarke has written an article on IAs as change agents. To quote: The kind of work IAs do leads to changes in the way people behave. We are in the business of providing tools and structures designed to allow people to do something in a different way (hopefully a better way!) than how they did it before. As Goodman wrote in the article cited above, "As IAs, we are not just architecting information; we are using information to architect change." Posted by jamesr at 09:00 AM
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Intranet usability shows huge advancesJakob Nielsen has written an update on intranet usability, based on his research. To quote: Our simplest usability metric is success rate, which measures whether users can complete their tasks with the user interface. In the first study, the average success rate was 74%; in the second study, it was 80%. An increase from 74% to 80% might not seem very big, but that's because the first study's success rate was already fairly high, and thus it was hard to increase it further. Posted by jamesr at 08:10 AM
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Segmenting staff information needsThere is no one-size-fits-all solution for meeting the needs of staff. Beyond the broadest level, the information needed by staff is not generic. Someone working in HR has quite distinct needs from a staff member in finance, the call centre, or in the sales team. This is why organisations are progressively implementing personalisation or segmentation features as part of their corporate intranets or portals. While the functionality that can be implemented varies greatly, there is a single goal: to better target information to the specific staff who need it. In practice, there are three main ways of segmenting staff needs for information, with a number of secondary considerations. Three primary facets There are three main aspects (or 'facets') that can be used to segment staff needs for information:
[CM Briefing 2007-18, read the full article] Posted by jamesr at 10:17 PM
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Collaboration tools are anti knowledge sharing?There is a clear need for collaboration within organisations, and the rollout of collaboration tools will bring many benefits. What is not widely recognised, however, is that the unmanaged spread of collaboration tools can work against knowledge sharing. While collaboration tools work extremely well for the staff using them, they can lead to hundreds (or thousands) of information 'silos', making it harder for other staff to find required information. This briefing will explore this issue, drawing on experiences gained across many different organisations. Collaboration works well Collaboration spaces work very well for the staff using them. Team and project spaces are a particularly good example of this, providing an effective space for team members to communicate and collaborate in. The ability to 'work in' these spaces is one of their greatest strengths, allowing easy sharing of content, documents, discussions, diaries and more. Far richer than file shares, intranets or document management systems, the current generation of collaboration tools have the potential to deliver considerable productivity benefits. What also makes these spaces successful is the 'shared context' amongst users. Because they are actively engaged in the ongoing use of these spaces, everyone knows what's happening, and where to find key information. In practice, collaboration areas naturally evolve to fit the needs of the staff who are using them, with the spaces matching the idiosyncrasies of the groups they serve. [CM Briefing 2007-17, read the full article] Posted by jamesr at 09:59 PM
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Intranet redesign for Canon AustraliaOver a number of years, Canon Australia developed an extensive portal-based intranet, known as iCON, for use by staff throughout the organisation. This included several phases of intensive redevelopment, in parallel with changes to the underlying technology platform. The intranet continued to grow and expand, eventually being given the mandate to deliver to a diverse range of audiences, including both internal and external users (effectively creating an extranet). This widening of the audience prompted a re-evaluation of the intranet, with the goal of ensuring that the site is effective in meeting the needs of current and future users. In mid-2006, Canon sought the assistance of Step Two Designs to begin the process of evaluating and redesigning iCON. This case study aims to give an overview of the process undertaken, as well as the initial outcomes. Project goals The Canon intranet team had seen iCON through two previous redesigns, so there was a good understanding of what is involved in designing and maintaining an intranet. As outlined above, the widening of the intended audience for iCON sparked off the latest project. Our first goal was to understand the organisation's needs and suitably prepare for this expansion of the intranet's role. Leading up to this project, the intranet team was well aware of a number of inadequacies with iCON. In order to properly understand these issues and sketch a picture of how the organisation worked, steps were taken to review business objectives and gather the input of staff across the organisation. This provided a clear direction for the intranet redesign, as well as identifying opportunities for new intranet capabilities and content. [Case study written by Patrick Kennedy, read the full article] Posted by jamesr at 08:50 PM
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Taking the best of both worldsA little while back I wrote an entry on enterprise 2.0, characterising the conflict between the libertarians and the corporate suits (noting the deliberate stereotyping). To quote:
The purpose of the post was to argue for the need to find a middle ground between the two extremes, recognising that both are wrong. In this piece I'd like to explore that further, by asking: what do we get if we take the best of both worlds? The idea is to move the debate beyond black-and-white, towards exploring how we make all this work in practice, how we avoid the pitfalls and maximise the benefits. To that end, here are my lists of what I would take from each approach, and what is currently offered by neither... Best of the libertarian approach
Best of the corporate suits approach
Currently offered by neither
Posted by jamesr at 08:27 PM
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The ties that findAndrew McAfee has written about the value of weak ties, as part of a business case for enterprise 2.0. To quote: Granovetters' great insight in SWT and later work was that these activities help strengthen already strong ties, but that weak ties might actually be the more important ones for innovation and knowledge sharing. Strong ties and weak ties are exactly what they sound like. Strong ties between people arise from long-term, frequent, and sustained interactions; weak ties from infrequent and more casual ones. The 'problem' with strong ties is that if persons A and B have a strong tie, they’re also likely to be strongly tied to all members of each other's networks. In other words, there’s likely to be a lot of overlap in their friendship circles. Posted by jamesr at 11:06 AM
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The inaugural 
A month or so ago I published an article on 
As always, it's fun to use these kinds of hands-on techniques, and the outcome seemed pretty reasonable. I'm not sure I'd use this approach frequently, but it was the right one to use here.
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